Child abuse-tracking tech donated to the world

A video content security company has donated its digital fingerprint technology to a global effort to tackle child abuse content online.

Netclean and Microsoft have already been working with the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC) to help law enforcement assign digital signatures to illegal photos distributed online. In March, ICMEC announced it was coordinating the formation of Project Vic, a cloud-based database of these fingerprints that content retrieved in police investigations across the globe can be compared against. The idea is local law enforcement runs the fingerprint software to seek out these markers, saving them time so they can focus on the unidentified material and the victims featured in them.

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Now, Friend Media Technology Systems (Friend MTS) -- which creates cloud-based security systems some of the world's largest media broadcasters use to identify illegal distribution of their content -- is donating its technology to the cause.

Every piece of illegal still footage identified by police forces participating in Project Vic is assigned a unique fingerprint based on the image pixels, and this is done with software like Microsoft's Photo DNA. The addition of the Friend MTS F1 technology means all video content can be assigned the same type of identifying marker as of today. Considering the vast amount of videos online, and the additional data that can potentially be extracted from them -- identifiable data such as location and perpetrators as well as victims in some cases -- the benefits of this new technology could be huge, speeding up the identification of criminal rings as police forces across the globe match up content.

The tech behind F1 is similar to the "robust hashing" technique used to assign signatures to photos, but more complex. "It's a hard problem," Friend MTS founder and CTO Jonathan Friend tells Wired.co.uk. "It's much more than a sequence of images -- one can't process video as simply a set of still images. That would produce too much data that we can't process in a meaningful way."

Instead, F1 uses different analytical methods based on movement-tracking. "Then a mathematical signature that's unique to a section of video over time is produced -- it's only a little bit of data, 56kb of data per hour of video." It means that even if a perpetrator chops up and edits the video, every frame could still be identified from the general signature assigned. "It profiles every frame of the video to calculate a signature."

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ICMEC is due to distribute the tech to all its partners in law enforcement, including those at Interpol, Homeland Security in the US, Europol and the Swedish, Dutch, Australian and New Zealand national police services, all of which are part of Project Vic.

ICMEC says Project Vic already allows law enforcement investigators to pre-identify 85 percent of images seized on a hard drive, so they can focus on the remaining 15 percent never seen by law enforcement before (at least, content that has not been seen, tagged, and uploaded to the database already). It means there is a better chance of identifying and potentially saving any victim identified in the content. Some of the worst videos have already been identified for the same purpose, and these can now be assigned a signature using F1. "The cooperation between law enforcement and the private sector is absolutely necessary, especially in the area of child sexual exploitation," commented Troels Oerting, Head of the European Cybercrime Centre at EUROPOL, in a statement. "Friend MTS's donation is an example on how this cooperation can have a direct impact in our capacity to identify children victim of sexual abuse.

This technology will provide the police specialists with a robust standard to filter the material seized in the frame of their investigations, giving them a new resource to focus on on-going abuses and rescue more children."

The head of Interpol's Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation Unit, meanwhile, urged "everyone hosting material online" to use the tech to ensure their services aren't being exploited.

Popular social networks and other internet giants collaborating with the ICMEC will also be provided with the tech -- Google, for instance, has been a key player on the scene, having worked with the Internet Watch Foundation for years in identifying criminal search results and removing them.

Part of the reason such fingerprints are being generated is so police and internet company employees can be saved from the arduous and mentally draining task of viewing such extreme content -- the system will automatically flag it up for them, so they do not have to trawl through hours and hours of normal content only to be confronted with disturbing footage.

It also means there could be an increased chance of identifying child abuse rings, with international crime units able to share information quickly and see how content is being proliferated across borders and continents.

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Video, has also been an increasingly worrying part of the problem with the proliferation of smartphones that can record short clips with ease. "Cell phones have been increasingly used to take these abuse videos," Richard Brown, Technology Officer for ICMEC, told Wired.co.uk. "An abuser can easily take a two or three minute abuse video of a child sometimes even if the parent is in the vicinity. Hundreds of these small clips and even selfies are being confiscated everyday."

It's the reason Friend MTS got involved in the first place. "We work a lot with the video industry," says Friend, "and one of our clients, a major broadcaster not in UK, understood there was a growing problem of video child pornography that law enforcement were seeing and trying to work out what tools could be used to address that. Some started producing specific tools, but these were not widely tested in industry. So in speaking with our client, we thought our tech could be used as a power of good. It's widely used and tested."

ICMEC's Brown explains that although many law enforcement officials do have their own version of the technology, they all work differently and so would not be suitable additions to the global database. "The issue is that in the United States we have 61 specialised task forces and three Federal agencies working on reviewing many of the same videos with different tools that fingerprint and catalogue the videos differently," he told Wired.co.uk. "In essence, each tool is slicing and dicing the video in a different way and fingerprinting it with algorithms that are different between each tool or method. "The Friend MTS donation allows us to give a common method to each tool provider so that they can really be processed in one standard way. Because of this we can now combine our hashes and load them into tools in large aggregate sets. This will eliminate the need for each investigator to look at material another investigator has already looked at and spent the time to catalogue."